The Outsiders on the Inside

Hi readers!

This week’s blog post is going to focus on readings from the book The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo, which details the proceedings of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

In reading Zimbardo’s account of how the prisoners (who were not actually guilty of anything) and the jail guards took on their roles (Zimbardo, 2007), I got curious about the guards’ and the prisoners’ motivations. Specifically, it fascinated me how it was seemingly easy for the jail guards to become brutal, bossy and rude, and the prisoners to accept it. The distraught prisoners were made to look unanimous and were only called by their numbers in a dehumanizing way (Zimbardo, 2007). While it was an experiment, these occurrences are not a far cry from what occurs in prisons.

I recently started watching The Outsider, which is a TV adaptation of Stephen King’s novel (I highly recommend it!). In the show, Terry Maitland is accused of murdering a young, local boy, and is taken to a prison while he awaits a trial. Despite the fact that Terry maintains his innocence and there is quite a lot of exculpatory evidence, he still faces discrimination, threats and violence in prison. Another man in the same prison was accused of a similar crime ended up with his throat being split (Bernstein & Bateman, 2012). As an outside viewer, it was easy for me to think that Terry’s fellow inmates should leave him alone because I think that he has a likeable personality and that he’s innocent, but they have no prior knowledge of Terry. I do not understand why individuals who ended up in prisons would want to cause more trouble.

I looked at research that studies prison violence and found a lot of information that made sense to me. It became very clear to me that prisoners are at a huge risk of multiple forms of violent victimization. Here are the stats:

• 15% of inmates under the age of 21 were victims of violent attacks

• 12.5% of inmates have been assaulted at least once

• 1/3 of inmates have been threatened with violence (Worrall & Morris, 2012)

There are multiple perspectives that attempt to explain prison violence, however the deprivation perspective stood out to me. Being a prisoner causes one to behave in ways that are parallel with their conditions; not only being deprived of freedom but being confined (Worrall & Morris, 2012). It made sense that when individuals feel that they are backed into a corner, they do unimaginable things. In the context of evil, the majority of evil acts do not occur without some sort of precedent. Overcrowding in prisons was also correlated with violence, worsening the confinement that prisoners experience (Worrall & Morris, 2012).

In summary, I found the ease at which the participants of the Stanford Prison experiment took on their roles shocking. Obviously, I have learned about the experiment before, but it was surprising to me how the guards overlooked the need to be a decent person, even when dealing with “bad” individuals (Zimbardo, 2007). The Stanford Prison experiment is slightly outdated, and I had The Outsider in mind, so I looked into how modern prison violence could fit into this narrative. Researchers suggest that prison overcrowding and deprivation of freedom can make prisoners violent, suggesting that the violence is a product of the prison conditions (Worrall & Morris, 2012).

Do you think that prisoners are exceptionally violent because it is a collection of criminals or because of the conditions of being confined in prison?

References

Bernstein, A. (Director), & Bateman, J. (Director). (2020). The Outsider [Television series]. HBO.

Worrall, J. L., & Morris, R. G. (2012). Prison gang integration and inmate violence. Journal of Criminal Justice, 40(5), 425-432.

Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect. New York, NY: Random House.